Republicans

Another one gone

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Lindsay Graham has left the presidential contest. For all the grief I gave him in my debate articles, I have to admit that Graham was starting to grow on me. Foreign policy is not my main area of expertise, but Graham’s ideas, while more bellicose than my own, were the product of intelligent thinking on the subject. He had a theory and he applied it, which is more than I can say for the sound bite- and photo op-based policies of some other candidates (and the current president). He cares about it, thinks it’s important, and wants to get it right. I wish he had polled highly enough to make it into the main debates, because he would have added the seriousness that few candidates brought to the table on that topic.

I also respect Graham for being himself. He’s weird, but he knows it, is comfortable with it, and has no intention of changing. I laughed at some of his jokes, and appreciated the contrast of one man who can inject humor into a situation where he is clearly experienced enough to relax, and a bunch of others who were nervously repeating sound bites. Many candidates’ humor, when it exists, is in memorized jokes written for them and crammed in to the first applicable opening in the conversation. It feels fake. Lindsey Graham is real.

He’ll be missed, at least around here, though I appreciate that he did the right thing in giving up where there was no hope of victory. The most shocking thing about Graham’s failure to catch fire was not that he fell short in Iowa and New Hampshire, but that he failed in his home state of South Carolina. Less than two years ago, Graham won re-election to the Senate convincingly. Yet in the last two polls before leaving the campaign, he was averaging 1.5% in his home state. If there is one lesson to be learned from the Graham campaign, it’s that the favorite son is dead, and the primary election system killed it.

A local candidate used to run as a favorite son, holding his state’s delegates at the convention in exchange for some favor from the eventual nominee. That’s a calculation the delegates of a state convention were able to make, but not one that a state’s primary voters are likely to consider. Even so, the eventual nominee ought to consider listening to Graham’s counsel and, if he wins, setting aside a place for Graham in the cabinet.

Two peas in a pod

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As a part of our continuing series looking at presidential candidates before they drop out, I thought I’d turn my gaze tonight on two fairly similar candidates: Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee.

These two are blasts from the past, with Santorum having last won an election in 2000, Huckabee in 2002. The both come from the theocratic wing of the party. Which is not to say they’d call themselves theocrats (although Huckabee is an ordained minister) but rather that their conservatism has more to do with tradition and religion than it does with libertarianism and supply-side economics.

Both are pretty good on the stump, although as a high-church Episcopalian, Santorum’s style speaks to me more than the Baptist cadences of Huckabee’s delivery, smoooooth though he is. Huckabee is better, too, at tapping into that strain of populism that seems to be coursing through the party these days, but neither man is quite good enough to get any serious notice. In the RCP average of polls, Huckabee sits at 2.3%, while Santorum lingers way down at 0.3%. In Iowa, where both men have had better success in the past, they both poll below 2%.

My main question besides why don’t they drop out is where their former supporters are going. Huckabee won the Iowa caucus with 34% of the vote in 2008. In 2012, Santorum squeaked by the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, by 24.56% to 24.53%. Where’s that vote going? Is it still up for grabs? It seems crazy to think they’ve flocked to the seriously non-religious Donald Trump. Are they voting Carson?

It’s still early and all that, but it’s not as early as it was. Iowa caucuses in 60 days! I predict both Santorum and Huckabee will stay in until then, but a bad showing there should end if for both of them. Huckabee will go back to selling books and Santorum will go back to, what, collecting sweater vests? Whatever he does. And then the real race for social conservatives’ votes can begin.

 

Jindal Drops Out

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It’s strange that Gilmore, Pataki, and Santorum continue to haunt Iowa’s 99 counties while Governor Bobby Jindal, a man of learning, good sense, and excellent experience, drops out for lack of funding and lack of interest.Much has been said of him already, but this analysis by Dan McLaughlin at Redstate says it best:

Jindal is both the youngest and most experienced candidate in the race, the one with the best record of conservative accomplishment, the best and most detailed conservative platform, and the proven character and ability to lead the nation in crisis and to turn policy proposals into actual results. He is both the best potential President in the 2016 GOP field and a better general election candidate than any of the alternatives who might be considered more conservative or more anti-establishment. No candidate is perfect, but Jindal deserves to be among the finalists in this race, and should certainly be a significant part of the next Republican Administration.

McLaughlin touted Jindal as the best candidate. I’m not sure I’d say that, though he was certainly in my top five. He is unpopular in his home state, but I hope he still has a future there and that we’ll see him in some future presidential sweepstakes. Before that happens, a Senate seat will likely come open in Louisiana next year. Jindal’s resume hardly needs polishing, but he would be a credit to the Senate and bring some needed intelligence to that lethargic body.

Mill-e-wah-que

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Tonight, the Republicans will gather for their fourth debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I suppose the locations don’t matter, but why they don’t do it in Iowa is beyond me. Anyway, the debate (on Fox Business Network) will be a little smaller this time, not because anyone has dropped out of the race, but because the debate organizers have required that a candidate average 1% in the national polls to participate. Three candidates, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, and George Pataki, have failed to reach even this low bar.

The field is still unwieldy enough to require two debates. Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, and Rick Santorum will sit at the kids’ table, while Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump take the main stage. I hope a debate among eight debaters proves easier to manage than one with ten, which has just seemed absurd at times.

As before, the task for the candidates in the first debate is to get noticed. As the primaries near, this begins to look more and more like a lost cause, but there is still some hope. Jindal polls higher in Iowa than he does in the national polls that determined his placement here, and Christie has the ability to make himself heard. The other two, if they don’t make a strong showing in Iowa (and they haven’t so far) are doomed.

At the big show, Kasich, Paul, Fiorina, and Bush are fighting against the draining of their supporters to the two emerging leaders among the normals: Rubio and Cruz. That sort of a break out is difficult: Fiorina achieved it once, in the performance that elevated her to the grown-up table, but since then her support has receded. For Paul, the number of like-minded libertarians in the party may be too small to move him any farther than he already is. Kasich does well among moderates and the media, but even the disproportionate attention he gets hasn’t raised his standing among actual voters. And for Bush, the challenge is the most acute. He went for the knockout last time, and Rubio counter-punched him back into his corner. It’s hard to see any different result this time.

Trump and Carson continue to struggle to find respect among serious voters, and I don’t see how they’ll do so tonight. Both have run policy-free campaigns. Will they get serious this time? I doubt it. Expect more bombast from Trump and weirdness from Carson.

That leaves the two frontrunners among serious candidates, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Cruz won some hearts in the last debate with his cogent policy remarks, self-awareness, and attacks on the inept moderators. More of the same won’t hurt him. Rubio, the recipient of several high-profile endorsements since the last debate, needs only to replicate his previous performances to show that he is the proper mainstream candidate around whom the party regulars should continue to coalesce.

Who Lost Appalachia, Part II

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Last night, the Democrats’ retreat from Appalachia turned into a rout as Matt Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky. The state had elected a Democrat to the office four years ago with a large majority, and mainstream opinion this time was that Bevin (who unsuccessfully challenged Mitch McConnell from the right in a primary in 2014) had no chance. He won by 9 percentage points.

This was a real test in Republican strength, and two points show that strength to be quite real. The first we knew for months: GOP voters outnumbered Democrats in the primary for the first time ever. That’s not always dispositive, but it shows a core party strength of numbers that conveys at least some advantage.

Second, the success carried down the ballot to some of the fairly anonymous row offices. These are as good a test as any for a parties’ statewide base, since it involves choosing a candidate that you know little or nothing about for an office you might not have known even existed. All you have to go on is the person’s name and party. The Republicans took most of these, with the Democrats holding only those in which their candidates had famous names (both are the children of Democratic politicians).

Kentucky has been Republican in presidential politics for a while now, but after last night we can say that it is well and truly a red state.

The Fall of the House of Bush

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Wednesday’s Republican debate had several interesting stories (I wrote about it here) but the most dramatic, and the most shocking from an historical perspective, is the decline of the candidacy of Jeb Bush. Although Bush never enjoyed the “inevitable” frontrunner status that Hillary Clinton holds over her fellow Democrats, Bush was seen as the man to beat at the start of his campaign. He had name recognition, a record of conservative governance, loads of cash, and connections to a family machine that knows how to win. But all those advantages have amounted to little as Jeb’s supporters slowly drained away over the last few months.

Plenty of pundits are calling this the end of Jeb. And for most candidates, it would be. But Jeb still has those resources to draw on, and I don’t think he’ll drop out before the Iowa caucus. Still, his position looks precarious.

This is kind of a strange thing to say. For years, we’ve been hearing about how Jeb was the smarter brother, the more reasonable, the more capable, the more electable. But those promises have all withered in the heat of a national campaign. Maybe George W. Bush was a better politician than we gave him credit for.

With voters and donors beginning to doubt him, Bush took drastic action, attacking his erstwhile protege Marco Rubio on national television. But Jeb is not meant for the heel’s turn. Everyone could tell his heart wasn’t in it, and after Rubio’s devastating response, Bush almost seemed to accept the rebuke, knowing he deserved it.

I’ve supported all of the Bushes for as long as I can remember being interested in politics. Look at this picture:

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One of those young Republicans is me (the other three are all Democrats now). Even then, I wanted four more years of a Bush presidency. In 2000, I voted for George W. in the primary and the general. I did the same in 2004, and I’m glad I did. All things being equal, 2008 should have been Jeb’s time. But all things are not equal, and even had 2008 not been a disastrous year for all Republicans, the voters were not likely to elect the brother of a man who had held the White House for the past eight years, no matter how popular or unpopular he might be.

We have a love-hate relationship with dynastic politics in this country, but twelve or sixteen years straight of the same family would have been too much for most any voter to swallow. That’s a credit to America’s republican values, but it doomed the chances of an otherwise highly qualified man. 2012, too, came and went. Could Jeb have won then? Maybe. I think he would’ve done better than Mitt Romney, especially in Florida, but even that might not have been enough. Which brings us to today.

Dynastic politics make me uncomfortable, as they do for a lot of people who believe that our republic should not be ruled by a small clique of powerful families. But I have to admit, that Jeb is a Bush is one of the things I liked about him. The Bushes are smart, conservative and (most importantly), they know how to win. And no matter what you think of a primary candidate, the first question you must ask about him is “can he win?” I thought Jeb could win, because I saw his brother win.

Lots of people look on Jeb’s fall with glee, but I’m not one of them. I still think no other candidate is better equipped to do the job of President from day one. He’s smart, well-versed on the issues, and ready to hit the ground running. If Pennsylvania’s primary were today, I’d probably still vote for him. But, more and more, I think 2016 is not Jeb’s year. What’s worse, it is probably his last chance.